Practical Weed Control

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The ten-day rule is the only rule in my garden. Everything else is pretty laid-back. Who needs rules unless they make life easier or better? In fact, the first ten-day period is the only one that I really get intense about. After that I am in control.

Mostly I try to get out to the garden a couple of times a week and I usually carry my favorite hoe. My favorite used to be an onion hoe. The blade is four inches wide and less than two inches deep. It is light and easy to manipulate. My current favorite is Danish. I don't know if it has a name but it is also light and easy to handle. A hoe and four-pronged cultivator are pretty much the only tools I use to cultivate once the crops are planted. I use a garden rake for large areas, like around the winter squash, if I am late with the mulch. I have a wheel hoe and a wheel cultivator. Both are good tools but I am usually too lazy to go down to the barn to get them. They were invaluable in the market garden as they cover ground faster, but I'm not in any hurry when I'm in my garden. I like it there.

THE GOLDEN RULE: Don't leave your soil unstirred for more than ten days for the first month after tilling. You'll never be bothered by weeds. No other chore should take higher priority.

Perennial Gardens

I'd really rather not talk about perennial gardens. They are a story of failure for me. This is a case of do as I say rather than as I do. Big bed of strawberries—gone. Two hundred feet of raspberry plantsgone. Eight hundred feet of asparagus bed—stalking the wild asparagus. The first problem was that I didn't take the time to prepare the soil properly. In this case I would have done well to till in the spring, till again in a month and plant buckwheat, till again when the buckwheat began to flower and plant winter rye, then plant, a year after I decided I wanted to plant these crops.

I'd better explain why I would plant green manure crops here instead of letting nature do her thing. The planted green manure crops will reach maturity at a prescribed time. I can schedule the turning under of the buckwheat because I know when it was planted and how long it will take for it to bloom, which is when I want to turn it under. Nature's plants are much less predictable.

Proper preparation of the beds would have helped but it wouldn't have been the whole answer. Weeds seem to be omnipresent. The seeds of the stems and the grasses and the creepers will do their job of trying to cover soil that has been scarred by our cultivation. We need to be there regularly to keep them under control.

I have one asparagus crown next to the barn door. It produces wonderful asparagus from mid-May through June and I visit that plant regularly and keep the weeds down by hand. The only weeds are spring seedlings that are easily dispatched. When I stop harvesting, the asparagus ferns that are left are well able to hold their own against surrounding weeds. Since asparagus is one of my favorite vegetables I am glad that I can still find tender shoots in the overgrown patch. That patch was planted as part of the market garden and I did keep up with it until I was pulled away from market gardening.

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